“They’re great and so different,” gushes the “First Love” singer. “You look a them and you think who is going to have a real recording career, who is going to have longevity. It’s hard to tell right now! … It’s what you make of it. It doesn’t matter if you come in 10th or first.”

But Idol aside, Ryan couldn’t help but notice how great J.Lo looked at the Billboard Music Awards on Sunday.

How’d she do it? “I did the vegan 22-day plan and it was really good and I kept on with it for a few more weeks, and now I’ve incorporated a little bit of fish here and there,” she explains. “But I’ve got to tell you I enjoy it. I enjoy eating that way. I never did. And I didn’t know how good you can feel when you put healthy stuff in your body.”

Once Idol wraps up, Jennifer will shift her focus to her own music career. Her A.K.A.album will be out on June 17. “I’m going to do a show in the Bronx,” she says. “A free concert in my hometown. It’s such a big deal, it’s so great. The minute we put the tickets out there, they were gone … It felt really good.”

And that’s not all. Jennifer has also put together a book, True Love, which will be released on October 28.

As she started to write it, she explains, “all of a sudden I’m having this cathartic journey through my own life. It was like I was holding up a mirror to myself in a way. Everything I had learned during that time. I had just gotten divorced and I was on the road with the kids by myself for the first time.”

So what did writing it teach her about true love? “I realized that love starts inside you,” she reveals. “You’ve got to love yourself first … until then, until you really figure out that piece and really understand what that means, which I did not, then it can go better for you.”